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I haven't seen any articles on where it's possible to get a postgrad Education in SEO or associated fields. And as I'm about to get such an education, I thought Id share what I've found.

For some time, Fullsail.com has been the only new media education player but now there are some traditional teaching institutions picking up online social media.

I have given up my day job and will be starting the MA in Social Media at City University Birmingham in 2 weeks. Ive included an indicative overview of course contents. Remember that this is the first running of the first of its kind course, so its unlikely to be perfect first time.

If you know of any Postgrad courses that I haven't mentioned, please add them in a reply.

MA Social Media at City University Birmingham, UK saw this in the works about 6 months ago. At the time it was the first postgraduate course that I had seen that was even related to SEO or my day to day work as a SEO/SEM. News of the course was picked up by a few mainstream papers who took a tongue in cheek approach and called it a Degree in Facebook and Twitter. To me that sounds like a killer niche.

Fast forward 6 months and I am leaving my wonderful agency in London to move to Birmingham and take a leap forward.

The MA attracted me for a few reasons:

1st of its kind course at a Postgrad level - an MA will allow me to catch up in some way against SEOs who have been working in the field for 10 years compared to my 1.5.Its not going to allow me to be the best seo in the world but it may allow me to be the best seo with a relevant social media postgrad degree in the world.

The world and their dog have degrees these days. MA and PHD are a must to stand out in your field

I will be able to work with some New Media companies and make new contacts in Birmingham and the field in general.

Drop out of the rat race, be a student, do only fun seo that interests me, party :D

I thought the people I would meet on this kind of course would be damn good people to know

Positives so far

Following fellow students and lecturers on twitter has been interesting and a great way to get to know them a bit before meeting them.

My fellow students are already contributing to the course blog at http://masocialmedia.com/

Worries so far

1st of its kind so its not going to be perfect, but I'm a believer in what you put in is what you get out and I'm getting first mover advantage anyway.

The lack of focus on technical and programming skills

Work, not because i will go back to being a poor student, but because I didn't want to spend a year away from SEO.

That would be 1 foot forward and 2 feet back. But it looks like I will be able to pick up quite a bit of work from contacts and companies I know (and you, yes you, can soon find my details in the SEOmoz jobs section - Im happy to write SEO optimised copy or do 1 off site reviews and business plans)

INDICATIVE COURSE CONTENTS
Social Media as Culture: This is a theory module which explores the current state of academic knowledge and debates around the emergence of social media that inform an understanding of related practices conceptualised as cultural. It will provide you with a systematic understanding of the approaches to studying social media culture and its social and cultural role and character.

Media Enterprise:
This module explores media production as enterprise. Whether establishing a new business for their own independent practice, or selling social media concepts into an established business, social media workers are by nature entrepreneurial. This module will also explore social enterprise and funding for social projects.

Social Media Practice:
This production module explores social media as an area of media practice in social enterprise, commercial, public and personal areas. In this module you will consider the different areas of media, cultural and creative production that come under the auspices of social media. You will explore the production practices and skills that this involves, and begin to develop your own professional practice through a range of production activities.

Production Lab:
This module prepares students for research by practice, developing skills required to complete the MA by practice.

MA by practice:
Not sure exactly what this will entail :)

Other relevant education

FULLSAIL.com MA Internet marketing
Lots of banner ads about from Full Sail recently about their new postgraduate Distance course. I did look at them initially but they looked like a spam online college or a place only for young kids with rich parents. Of course forcing me to buy an Mac as part of my course was never going to fly anyway.

SETH GODINS ALTERNATIVE MBA
Wow. That post was inspirational reading. An alternative MBA program. Unaccredited, residential, free and six months long. No official MBA award, but working closely with Seth to get your dream off the ground. Looked like a once off, but worth keeping an ear to the ground if he does another.If anyone has any experience of FullSail or the Seth Godin MBA please comment.

Looking forward to letting you all know how it goes through this year and maybe introducing some course mates to SEOmoz.

About firstconversion —
Yaaar! I am the piratical, eye-patched founder of firstconversion.com where I do startup marketing. Stuck on shore after a regrettable incident with a whale, I have helped startups like Mendeley, Trialreach and Wooshii make money online and now work in Warsaw helping Codility. Codility either a) works to restock the North Sea with cod after it was all eaten by whales or b) tests developers skills during hiring so you don't waste time with people who can't code. Follow me on twitter @firstconversion (no whales)

You'd think a school that is giving a course in internet marketing, and I would hope usability goes along with that, would think of a different font color then orange. Man is that hard to read at times!

I've been anxiously watching the posts here as some form of post graduate study or Internet Marketing related MBA is in my plans for 2010. When interviewing for jobs this year I'd mentioned to one potential employer my desire to get my MBA to which he (an MBA) mentioned that it might not be worth the cost at this point in my career and that I might just want to consider some masters certificate work instead.

Having done some exploring I'd come across the Full Sail program and an Internet Marketing Master's Certificate program with the University of San Francisco Online (www.usanfranonline.com/online-certificates/internet-marketing.aspx) which also offers Advanced Specialization in Web Analytics or Social Media.

I'd be curios to hear the feedback from others about their experience how this one compares to others out there.

Bill - not sure if you saw this yet but the University of San Francisco just released two new programs which offer certificates in Mobile marketing and search engine marketing. They have a pretty good mix of programs.

Just came across your post today. And I'm very interested in hearing more about your program and see how it's fairing so far. I've always been an advocate of education and degrees, even though they might cost some, so I'll love to get some feedback about the programme and whether its worth it as well.

It will be interesting to hear more on this topic, especially when you have finished the program and can compare it to educating one's self online by partaking in communitites and working with actual clients.

I've often wondered as a current undergraduate student if someday there will be some kind of post-graduate degree in Social Media or SEM. I figure it will happen eventually and now I see that sure enough it is happening. Though I have my own and have read other's concerns that such a degree is somewhat shaky as these industries are still young and so dynamic. It will be interesting to see your experience and how it turns out.

On a related note... (and I don't mean to thread-jack your post but I see them as related. ie. current training and undergrad/post-grad training.

Due to the dynamic nature of SEM I've read from many people that certifications don't mean anything. As a relative SEO noob are there any certifications worth my money to get the basics? I've taken only one "course" so far-the SEMPO basic course. Outside of that I've taken the advice of many and simply become an avid reader of online blogs/forums and started my own blog to "do" rather than "read" how to do SEM. Any thoughts? Any certifications worth my money, or carry any weight for an SEM job when I graduate in less than a year?

On my side, I have also studied web analytics (post graduate) last year: http://www.tech.ubc.ca/webanalytics/

Those courses are really good. There are a few chapters about SEM, but it was a bit old, but anything Analytics related was amazing, and very insightful.
I heard that econsultancy also sponsors a master in online marketing based in Manchester.

The secret for being constantly up to date is to educate ourselves I guess and follow what's going on constantly, with blogs like SEOMOZ, conferences, and obviously up to date books.

Everyone has their own learning style, of course, but my view is that jumping straight in is the best way to learn. I was an engineer in my previous career and I learned more in my first month on the job than I did during the 4 years studying for my degree. SEM/SEO has been the same way for me. Keep on reading the latest books and blogs, but nothing helps as much as actually doing.

Depending on the skills you already have, I think that there are more useful courses than the theory behind social media - statistics, basic coding, brand marketing... This is core knowledge that isn't subject to change with the latest fad in social media websites or search engines.

Well I'll be honest and say I'm cautiously intrigued by this. While it seems a bit crazy to be going to school for Social Media, I do think at some point higher education needs to start more effectively "teaching" students about these practices.

My biggest question with this would be how adaptive are the institutions going to be? Meaning, most of the time once a course is set and written, that seems to be it for years to come. With Social Media my expectation would be that as things change the course will evolve. So if a new platform comes out and sticks for a certain period of time it should then be incorporated into the course work somewhere.

Best of luck to you, and hope you'll keep us updated on how tihngs are going and if you feel it's worth the money and time spent.

The focus is not about what to click in which apps, its about how to approach Social Media.

There was a beautiful talk yesterday from one of the past students of a course in the Media dept. She had her own business and decided to build her MA around her business. Everything she did for her MA was 100% focussed on and implemented in her business.

You can also see from the BCC meetup page http://www.birminghamsmc.com/ that one of the past talks was about data, mashups and APIs.

I havent seen any professors in tweed jackets and smoking pipes yet ;)

That's a cool idea to have classroom education. Although you have to wonder-- the folks who seem to be leaders in social media are typically hanging out online all day, as opposed to being in a classroom. I suppose this would be quite effective for anyone at an agency or is in-house-- or wherever a degree would carry weight. My personal take is that the best way to learn social media is just to get in there and do it-- to participate in the conversations and network with the folks who count!

I wrote this post a while ago, and i thought Id comment now as im moved up to Birmingham and had the first day of the course today.

This is definitely not going to be a license to do SEO. It is an academic look at social media.

There are 7 people on the course from all around the world.

This course fits into a whole suite of courses at the Uni around Media in general. There will be a lot of interaction with people studying MAs in online journalism, journalism and culture, film production etc etc

Today was the first day of activities and it was the Birmingham media meetup.

Morning

We all trooped down to a coffee shop and met and networked with folks from all walks of media in Birmingham. Just being in this environment is such a super positive boost and lots of people are in companies, start ups and endeavours with others that they met at this event.

I met a Jamie, who is helping the local council use twitter and video effectively, Nathan who was trying to find help to promote his gifts and art business, Kaz, who suffered acne and runs a blog helping people with acne, local film companies and academics - a real melting pot

Afternoon

#BCCDIY hack day. Such a sweet concept: create a community generated version of the Birmingham City Council website.

We all went to help Seth who was build a workable version of the Birmingham City Council website in a day.

Apparently, BCC have just spent almost £3 million pounds on their new website which resembles their old website and they paid by the page for it to be transfered to the new template. A short video of Seth explaining the reasons here: http://bit.ly/hUnca

Althought the BCCDIY site was built by scraping the existing site, there is nowhere to get data on when rubbish is collected, so theres a shout out on twitter for everyone in Birmingham to respond with their postcode and the day their rubbish is collected

It was a collaborative effort and we, as students, got to pitch in and help wherever in the process we wanted to be.